Conversation with Tania Runyan, poet/teacher, consultant/editor Poetic License
May 2004

(you can check out the Poetry Daily web site at www.poems.com)

How did you become interested in poetry? Are you a poet yourself?

No, I'm not a poet, nor is Diane Boller, Poetry Daily's co-editor. My last poems were included in my junior high school's literary annual -- a peak I could never hope to approach again! Perhaps one of the things that Diane and I contribute to poetry publishing is not being poets ourselves. Most of what's published in contemporary poetry is selected and edited by practicing poets, so Poetry Daily goes at it from a slightly different angle.

My first memory of verse of a non-biblical sort is my mother reading to my brothers and me from a book of James Whitcomb Riley. The first book of poetry (well, drama-in-verse) I can remember buying myself was Shakespeare -- a volume of the comedies -- when I was in the 8th grade or so. Then much later, I ended up an 11th-hour English major in college, rather desperately cramming in as many "centuries" as I could into my last year, after something of an epiphany reading William Blake in a survey course ("The Sick Rose" did the trick -- the first poem I ever memorized, I believe); but, as must often be the case, even for those in better control of their education than I was, I left college for law school without any real exposure to poets more recent than Eliot.

After a poetry-free 3 years in law school, I went to work for a law book publishing company, where at first the work was seasonal (tied to legislative activity), leaving me with time on my hands. I started spending very long lunch hours sitting in the basement of a drugstore in our town, which then contained a small book store, including some poetry. This was where I first started reading contemporary poets. I've been reading ever since.

Why did you start the Poetry Daily Web site?

To make it easier for people to find poets and poetry they might like. We live in a university town that is replete with book stores, some of which now pay some real attention to new poetry. But for years it was tough to know what was going on in poetry or where to turn to find out what was going on. Often the only magazines or journals that could be found in bookstores were battered old single copies of Poetry Magazine or maybe The Paris Review. The shelves (half-shelves, often) of poetry books were often baffling -- who were these poets and how did these few make the cut? Diane and I had the same experience, we discovered, of watching people in bookstores staring at the poetry shelf, maybe fingering an anthology, then moving on, empty-handed, with a frown. The problem, of course, has to do with the economics of poetry publishing. Print runs can be as low as 500 or 1,000 copies; and if we figure that the budget for promoting a book like that, if there was one at all, might be $1 per copy at best, you can see that the neither the word nor the book is going to get very far abroad...

In our law publishing lives, Diane and I had gotten involved with electronic publishing very early on -- both on CD and on the Internet. (I discovered that Diane was devoted to poetry when I was in her office one day and spied a thin volume of poems -- one of W.S. Merwin's books, I think -- peeking out from behind great big books like Federal Rules of Evidence Manual, and Liability of Corporate Officers and Directors). It occurred to me that the Internet could provide the means of bringing poetry readers, poets, and publishers together at very low cost -- of getting the word out miles beyond publishing budgets. We sketched some ideas for a web site, got in touch with some editors, poets, and publishers, to see what they thought (a number had not yet seen the Internet), and went to work...

Who picks the poems you post? What are the selection criteria? How far in advance do you choose the poems? Do you have to get the poet's permission to post the poem?

Both Diane and I make selections. We try to do several different things with our picks. We often select poems that appeal to us personally, of course, but we also are intent on fairly representing the very broad range of poetry published in English these days. For example, we want to give readers a feel for what they can expect to find in the journals we receive, should they decide (and we hope they do!) to subscribe to one of them -- what sorts of poetry are to be found in The Kenyon Review, as opposed to FENCE or Poetry Ireland Review. This means we often are featuring poets who are new to us, poets whose work may be very traditional or on the borders of what can be called "poetry," poets whose work may or may not become personal favorites for us. But we are looking in all cases for poems that seem to us "authentic" -- we have to hear, or think we hear, some sort of music (even if sometimes a bit dissonant for our own tastes) emanating from a poem. It might be only a faint chime, but a bell of some sort has to ring somewhere along the line.
Poems are usually selected as few as 7 days in advance of our features, or as many as 3 or 4 weeks in advance. We need at least some lead time to communicate with the poets and publishers. But, particularly for new books, we want to get to them while they are still literally new, so we work pretty close to deadline sometimes.

And, yes, you're right: we don't publish without the permission of both the publisher and the poet, although sometimes the poet has delegated the permission authority to the publisher or journal. There are a few variations.

What kinds of poets do you publish? Are they all well-known writers? Describe the backgrounds of some of your writers (ages, nationalities, occupations, etc.)

We've published poets sure (or as sure as one can be in predicting literary history -- a shaky pastime) to be in the Pantheon of great poets some day, and poets appearing in print for the very first time. We've featured Stanley Kunitz, who is in his 90s and still going strong, and poets still in school (I think the youngest so far, probably, was in college; we receive one journal, Hanging Loose, that sometimes features high school writers, but we've not yet selected a high school-age poet. But if the bell should ring one day...) American poets are a very diverse group, so we've featured poets of all backgrounds, in terms of ethnic groups and national heritage; plus we are receiving an increasing number of publications from abroad, so we feature an increasing number of poets from the UK, Ireland, and Wales, for example. Finally, we feature work from non-English-speaking poets in translation. This week, for example, we featured a poem by a poet born in Tunisia and raised in France, translated by the American poet, Marilyn Hacker. Many are in academia, teaching English or creative writing in high schools, colleges, and graduate schools; but others we've featured have made their livings as automotive die designers, lawyers, doctors, farmers, furniture makers, psychotherapists.... Recently we featured a poet who works as assistant manager of a Brooks Brothers clothing store in Florida.

How many people visit your site each day? Are there certain busy seasons when more people visit your site? What kinds of readers visit your site?

We have had as many as 40,000 individual visitors to Poetry Daily on a single day. We average a good bit more than 1 million "page views" each month. Poetry Month (April) and holidays and special occasions (Valentine's Day is the biggest of these) are peak times, and traffic builds steadily during school terms each year, partly because many many teachers make use of Poetry Daily in their teaching. Also, numerous readers have made Poetry Daily the home page on their computers, so that we pop up when they go online each day.

Our readers are of all ages and occupations. We hear from both elementary school-aged aspiring poets and retirees. We stopped counting countries from which readers reach us at 60, as I recall. It has been a while since we did a survey of our readers, but we found heavy equipment operators, military (we hear from sailors at sea and soldiers posted abroad), the professions, the unemployed, designers, civil servants, homemakers.... My favorite note was from a woman on a research ship in the Antarctic, who had read a poem on our site by an old friend.

What are you hoping readers will gain from visiting your site?

First, we hope they enjoy the poems from day to day. We know that some of our poems will elude some people or frustrate them, even make them mad sometimes; some poems will delight most readers immediately, some will grow on readers over time. But our hope is that, by visiting day by day, our readers will get an increasing feel for what the very broad, very rich range of contemporary poetry in English is like, and will be better able to seek out their own new favorites in books and magazines as they appear. Poetry, like the other arts, is sometimes treated as if it may not be approached without a priestly class of interpreters to initiate readers in the mysteries. It's true, of course, that time and study is repaid handsomely in all the arts. But we want readers not to feel like supplicants but like they are already a part of the community. We want them to get off their knees before the temple and come on in. We trust that they can follow their own eyes and ears to what seems to them worthy of their attention, and that they will invest their time and effort to go deeper into the art when they are ready. When they are, we'll do what we can to help with that too. But, first, do come on in!

What are the differences between reading poetry on the Web and reading poetry in a book or literary journal?

Great question, and one I'm not sure I'm "qualified" to answer! I suspect that young readers, those who began reading in the first instance, both online and in print, are the ones who can tell us the answer. The web is a very rich place these days, but for me, the web still does best what it did first -- provide easy, democratic access to things that previously were hard to find. I love discovering poets that are new to me online (and we will be featuring more poets whose work appears in online-only magazines as time goes on), but these discoveries invariably drive me to look for books by the poets or the journals in which they typically are found, and I look to read them longer-term in print. This dates me, I guess, but there it is!

What advice would you give to a beginning/young poet?

Read read read read read as much poetry as you can!

Finally, please complete the following sentence: Poetry matters to me because. . .
... it somehow slows time to a stop and uses words to say the unsayable, helping me realize just what it means to be alive.